Originally Posted by OldSarge

So in other words ignore the parts that sink your theory. Eat the whole rotten apple and not to worry you will 'splain it to us slow thinkers. No what is odd is you appear to believe that your source doesn't show your false ideas and thinking. The caveats are your own sources don't back up your claim. The books are cooked. Crime is under reported. The newspapers paint a different picture that we all should ignore according to you. A rather pitifull performance overall.

No one has managed to present any caveat here about the British Crime Survey
which my data comes from. As for newspapers being more accurate, that would be like arguing newspapers in America are a better source of information about crime than the NCVS or the FBI UCR. Dream on.

Originally Posted by NATO 556

Galileo seems to be one of those people who has a very high opinion of himself. He seems to argue that no matter what the facts say, no matter who government entity says, unless it directly reflects what he says then it's completely wrong.

It takes a certain type of man to argue a position that basically boils down to "nevermind what the facts say, I know more than anyone; only pay attention to what I tell you!"

No matter how many times we try and point out the fallacies in your position, Galileo, even when we use official government statistics, you still claim that everybody is wrong while you're always right.

All the above is much more accurate if you replace "Galileo" with "NATO_556".
I have presented facts from the BCS that have been ignored by people like you.

Here are some more facts for you to ignore while you continue to have an overly high opinion of yourself:

1997: a total of 16,500,000 crimes committed
2000: a total of 12,899,000 crimes committed
http://www.crimereduction.homeoffice...s/vc020102.htm

A few things in general. As stated earlier by me in particular, Yes crime has gone down in England. One cannot be one of the Western World's most violent places, and and have crime go up continually. That is just not possible. There must be an absolute worse case.

Just as it is true that crime will never be zero. There is a bottom point too. And to the extent that the UK's crime problem has come down, after increasing for many years, has nothing to do with gun control! Here is one of the many articles explaining some of the crime drop. Good Police work, and good crime fighting practices.

Manchester: 'Streets safer after jailing of Gooch Gang members'

Martin Wainwright reports from Moss Side, where shootings, murders and drug offences have plummeted after the jailing of members of the 'Gooch Gang'

This is what we have been saying will work, all along. They Jailed the Violent Drug Gangs who are committing most of the problems, and a HUGE part of the Violent Crime. They also have police in boroughs out of cop cars, and walking beats making sure that doors and windows are locked. Even to the point of annoying the residents who feel their privacy is violated by cops walking into unlocked homes chastising them for having an unlocked door or window. . So they are working the correct system correctly and very hard.

While the US has been concentrating on criminals, and it has accounted for a large crime drop, dropping crime near 40 year lows, Australia and England set out on the experiment of using gun control as crime control and both failed miserably.

They learned their lessons! They have become smarter. They are now employing our methods! Canada too!

Originally Posted by Galileo

This is absolutely untrue. You presented information that cast doubt on the validity of police records of crime. However, as I have pointed out a few times already (and which you continue to conveniently ignore) the graph that I presented was based on information from the British Crime Survey, not on crime recorded by the police.

And yet, since we know the books are cooked, we have this from YOUR source, showing recorded police crimes much higher than the BCS. This inconsistency is glaring! (Incidentally showing the crime figure improvements I mentioned.) However, note the continuing upward trend in crime for more years then British Crime Survey. I don't know, maybe people are tired of reporting crime without anything being done.

Trends in serious recorded offenses, total police crime and the BCS

And to be clear, it is NOT the Police who are complicit in the cover up, it is the British Home Office, under government directive who are creating the unreliable figures.

Besides the under reporting, here is another way the books have been cooked.
Three Strikes and You're ... in Like Flint

Other crimes including common assault, threatening behavior, sex with an underage girl or boy, and car theft should normally be dealt with by a caution, if the offenders admit their guilt but have no criminal record.

Doc Jones shows us this.

Originally Posted by Doc Jones

BBC NEWS | UK | Police miscount serious violence

and this

Gun crime 60pc higher than official figures - Telegraph

Data provided to The Sunday Telegraph by nearly every police force in England and Wales, under freedom of information laws, show that the number of firearms incidents dealt with by officers annually is 60 per cent higher than figures stated by the Home Office.

Originally Posted by Galileo

You say that gun control must not be effective because the study's conclusions about gun control were inconclusive. By such reasoning, owning firearms also can't be an effective way to protect oneself against crime because the study's conclusions about defensive gun use were also inconclusive.
How inconsistent can you be?

First of all, what I said was

Originally Posted by Tither

In fact, maybe knowing that none of your victims has a gun, and can't defend themselves against the 10 of you, might have the effect of emboldening the Criminal element!

I leave it to the readers who pass by to determine the logic of the statement!

However, you seem to have a real problem telling the difference between what is said, and what you hope I had said. Or maybe that was just convenient for you to do.

Originally Posted by Galileo

Evidence of this? How can you be so sure about what their intent was? You selectively choose which parts of the conclusions of those studies to believe while dismissing the parts that aren't helpful to your agenda.

I dismiss nothing. I just don't care about the studies you say are important to you! I don't need them to be in the right on this subject. There is a difference!

Your problem is, you want to change our laws and our Constitution's Bill of Rights! However, Crime in the US is near 40 year lows, We the People do not agree with your radical position, and all of your anti-gun studies have been stripped of the overwhelming conclusions that Anti-gunners claimed were there all of this time.

In other words, you do not have a legal or moral leg to stand upon.

Be this as it may, if you think that the Clinton appointed CDC was not anti-gun, and if you hope that We the People's memory is so short, so as not to remember the hatchet job they did not the 2nd Amendment, then I say Good luck with that! I remember the Incoming Bush administration not replacing the members of the CDC but telling them to cease and desist on the anti-2nd amendment practices. Anti-gun Bill Clinton paid for the 51 studies, in the hopes of providing us pro-gunners a huge feces sandwich. It backfired!

Now let's look at who paid for the National Academy of Sciences studies.

The panel was established during the Clinton administration and all but one of its members were known to favor gun control.

The study by the Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academy of Science, was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Joyce Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

Kind of a who's who of gun controllers!

Originally Posted by Galileo

No one has managed to present any caveat here about the British Crime Survey
which my data comes from. As for newspapers being more accurate, that would be like arguing newspapers in America are a better source of information about crime than the NCVS or the FBI UCR. Dream on.

I am not the dreamer here. Your own sources sink you on the validity of British sources. The British Crime Survey is tea leaf reading. Here is a clue, survey = a poll eh! Your claim is like saying the Brady bunch has not been proven wrong. I'd believe your papers since they have to conform to slander and libel laws unless thats gone from over there.

As to our papers your strawman is on fire. Ours have been proven wrong in case after case. Stephen Glass affair being one. Maureen Down, aptly named, has been caught doing plagerism.

What is it that keeps Galileo fluttering back to it like a moth to the flame?

The BCS measures the amount of crime in England and Wales (the first survey covered Scotland as well, but now Scotland and Northern Ireland carry out their own crime surveys) by asking people about crimes they have experienced in the last year. The BCS includes crimes which are not reported to the police, so it is an important alternative to police records. The survey collects information about:

the victims of crime
the circumstances in which incidents occur
the behaviour of offenders in committing crimes

The BCS currently interviews over 51,000 people aged 16 or over every year. This includes around 47,000 interviews in the main survey, with an additional boost to the number of interviews with 16- to 24-year-olds. The survey was also extended in January 2009 to include 4,000 interviews with children aged 10–15 each year.

rds british crime survey

So in other words it is an expanded Gallup poll. Since crime is either under reported or not reported to the government stats are worthless. Yet our star struck one says there are no caveats tied to this poll.

So how is this poll/survey done?

We cannot include everyone in the country in every survey as this would be too expensive and take too much of everyone’s time, so we select a sample of a few thousand people to represent the country as a whole. For example, for our household surveys, addresses are chosen at random from the Post Office’s list of addresses throughout the country. All our surveys use random sampling to make sure that all groups of people are properly represented and everyone has an equal chance of being able to help with our surveys. Once a person or household has been chosen we cannot substitute other people because we could not be sure that we were talking to a representative cross-section of society.
Social Survey Division - Taking Part in a Survey

In the words of the survey people it is random sampling. So there are no caveats in random sampling eh!

Stripped of all its flim-flam, the British Crime Survey is about as informative - for one thing, no one under the age of 16 allowed to give evidence, so that loses a whole stratum of new-type knife victims - as a questionnaire on your favourite shampoo.
Addresses of interviewees, we're told, are drawn at random from post office lists.

Which means that if you live in a crime-free area, you're going to give crime-free replies.

'Now let me see, Audrey, when was it we got mugged for half a crown in Frinton-on-Sea?

You remember
The British Crime Survey? It's all lies, damned lies and crime figures | Mail Online
The Dark Figure of British Crime by Claire Berlinski, City Journal Spring 2009
WalesOnline - News - Wales News - British Crime Survey

No caveats except from the British media but we need not pay any heed to them. Because we know sheep lie! The government takes a poll, the media paints a different picture and we are supposed to believe the star gazer. Yea right.

I will say this about the BCS, it first alerted us originally to the cooks over at the home office, who were using recipes of their own to make the statistics say what they wanted them to.

Then the papers started working with the actual figures from the police boroughs themselves, in order to get an actual picture of what was really going on.

Originally Posted by Tither

And yet, since we know the books are cooked, we have this from YOUR source, showing recorded police crimes much higher than the BCS. This inconsistency is glaring! (Incidentally showing the crime figure improvements I mentioned.) However, note the continuing upward trend in crime for more years then British Crime Survey. I don't know, maybe people are tired of reporting crime without anything being done.

Of course, if the police statistics are inaccurate because of cooked books and the BCS is accurate you would expect there to be a discrepancy between the two measures of crime. Of course, there is going to be a discrepancy between the wrong answer and the right answer. So I don't see what point you are trying to make by simply pointing out the existence of this expected discrepancy. I found the following report which contains some explanation about this discrepancy:


"In 1998/99 there were changes to the police counting rules and extensions to the offences covered that influenced comparisons (e.g. common assault only became a police recorded crime in 1998/99 and so is not in the comparable subset for longer-term comparisons)............

"The increase in violent crime recorded by the police, in contrast to the estimates from the BCS, appears to be largely due to increased recording by police forces. Taking into account recording changes, the real trend in violence against the person in 2001/02 is estimated to have been a reduction of around five per cent "
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb702.pdf

"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief." - Leon Festinger

There, all cleaned up and you said it yourself

Originally Posted by Galileo

Of course, if the police statistics are inaccurate because of cooked books and the BCS is accurate you would expect there to be a discrepancy between the two measures of crime. Of course, there is going to be a discrepancy between the wrong answer and the right answer. So I don't see what point you are trying to make by simply pointing out the existence of this expected discrepancy. I found the following report which contains some explanation about this discrepancy:


"In 1998/99 there were changes to the police counting rules and extensions to the offences covered that influenced comparisons (e.g. common assault only became a police recorded crime in 1998/99 and so is not in the comparable subset for longer-term comparisons)............

"The increase in violent crime recorded by the police, in contrast to the estimates from the BCS, appears to be largely due to increased recording by police forces. Taking into account recording changes, the real trend in violence against the person in 2001/02 is estimated to have been a reduction of around five per cent "
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs2/hosb702.pdf

Sorry Charlie but your famed source turns out to be no source as I and others have pointed out. Any poll is loaded by the questions asked and the persons polled or if you will "surveyed." Yours is done by postal code which in the case of no crime areas renders any data skewed. Now if you could some how convince your socialist government to find out what truth is, maybe you would do better.

this is the fallacy that the poster clings to; it means the only answer is denial by choice.

Leon Festinger. Cognitive Dissonance Theory. When Prophecy Fails.

Ministry spin must stop, says watchdog

New laws are needed to stop the Government "spinning" official figures to its own advantage, a Whitehall watchdog said yesterday.

The Statistics Commission said departments were risking accusations of abuse by using early access to data to present them favourably.

One in five Home Office statistics are unreliable, says department head

Sir David Normington, who had to apologise yesterday to the Commons public accounts committee for supplying inaccurate data on anti-social behaviour orders, said 30 of the 160 main sets of figures covering crime, immigration and prisons used by the Home Office were simply not up to the job.

Public lack confidence in justice system, poll shows -- Nearly 70 per cent of the public lack confidence in the justice system, an official poll revealed.

The Tories accused the Government of failing to address "real issues" like sentencing and instead focusing on "gimmicks and spin".

Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary said: "Is there any wonder 70 per cent of people lack confidence in the criminal justice system when ministers focus on gimmicks and spin rather than addressing real issues - like honesty in sentencing, properly enforced community penalties and building enough prison places."

Crime is running at '60m offences a year'

The true level of crime is four times higher than official figures have previously shown with more than 60 million offences committed each year in Britain, according to a report published today.

The report, compiled by the think-tank Civitas and based on Home Office research, much of which is unpublished, discloses, however, that the official total severely underestimates the real level of crime.

"Until members of the public do ask, the Government has every intention of pretending the crime figure is under control."

Mr Green, whose report draws together all available Home Office research and statistics on crime for the first time, said that one flaw in the BCS was that it excludes all murders, drug offences and crimes against under-16s.

What did the home Office say about this report?

Jon Simmons, the head of the Home Office crime statistics unit, has seen the figures used by Civitas and has confirmed that they are accurate, saying that he is "content" with the report's findings.

Row over figures as crime drops 5%

Meanwhile, the figures recorded by the police showed a 1% rise in overall crime, with a 12% jump in violent crime.
The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said the BCS did not record "various categories of violent crime", including murder and rape, retail crime, drug-taking, or offences in which the victims were aged below 16.

"The most reliable measure of crime is that which is reported to the police," he added. "We're facing over a million violent crimes a year for the first time in history."

Crime statistics are enough of a political football as it is without this kind of manipulation by the home secretary."